Your Place or Mine movie review: Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher charm their way through Netflix’s middling rom-com

Of course, movies like this are almost proudly superficial. They deal not with specifics but with universality. Everybody has experienced heartache and yearning, writer-director Aline Brosh McKenna assumes, as she invites you to take courtside seats and watch two icons of the genre remind you, with effortless charm, why you keep returning to it over and over again, despite the unfavourable odds.

Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher play Debbie and Peter, two best friends who slept together decades ago but decided not to take things further. Cut to the present day; she’s a single mother who wants to make up for lost time by taking a course in New York, and he’s a wealthy consultant who has settled into a lone-wolf lifestyle. They live on opposite coasts, but they’re inseparable.

The movie opens with Peter having a long conversation with her on his birthday, moments before he’s dumped by the woman he’s seeing. He spends his days lounging around in his slick but characterless NYC apartment, and she lives in a vibrant little bungalow atop a Los Angeles hill. Both of them are comfortable, but generally dissatisfied. When Debbie’s baby-sitter backs out hours before she was scheduled to leave for New York, Peter offers to fly down to LA and take care of her 13-year-old son Jack, while she completes her one-week course. The plan is for them to swap houses, like they’re in The Holiday. Although this would’ve been way funnier had either of them actually acknowledged the similarities on screen.

But a lack of winky self-awareness notwithstanding, Brosh McKenna understands the value that two good-looking leads can bring to a movie like this. And it literally has characters point this point to both Debbie and Peter. “He’s still got that tall, square-jawed, long-eyelash thing going on,” one character tells him, while another describes Debbie as ‘a sexy Gen X Earth Mama.”

Having efficiently set the scene, Brosh McKenna could’ve taken the movie in two directions. Your Place or Mine could have turned into a story about a self-centred man who discovers that there’s more to life than empty hook-ups and a rebellious attitude when, like Hugh Grant in About a Boy, he is given the responsibility of taking care of a human child. Or, it could have played by genre conventions and immediately sent them on a path towards each other. But the foreshadowing is passive to the point of being an afterthought. For most of its run time, it feels like Your Place or Mine has completely forgotten that it is a Netflix rom-com at all. And not in a subversive way.

For starters, Brosh McKenna has Debbie and Peter spend almost the entirety of the movie in separate cities, united only by her frequent use of the split-screen and cross-cutting. This couldn’t possibly have been any fun to film, but at least Kutcher has the kid to share scenes with. Witherspoon is on the phone most of the time, but when she isn’t, she’s all by herself. To be sure, it always feels like they’re connected, but you’re never able to gauge their chemistry. And while Debbie and Peter’s near-constant use of technology gives the movie a contemporary edge (and perhaps an added layer of relatability), nothing can replace the feeling of being in the same room with another person and feeling the energy shift, as you watch the air become thick with electricity and tension, buzzing in anticipation about who will make the first move.

For all its warmth, Your Place or Mine is never able to conjure passion like this on screen; we won’t be getting back together with rom-coms anytime soon. What should’ve felt like coming back home ends up resembling a tour of an IKEA warehouse.

Your Place or Mine
Director – Aline Brosh McKenna
Cast – Reese Witherspoon, Ashton Kutcher, Jesse Williams, Tig Notaro, Zoë Chao, Steve Zahn
Rating – 2.5/5